homiletics

In this paper I examine the first collection of sermons of László Ravasz, published by him between 1903–1910 in several journals, such as the Református Szemle, the Protestáns Prédikátori Tár, the Protestáns Szemle, and later in his book entitled Ez ama Jézus. These sermons stage the first steps of Ravasz in the field of homiletics and preaching, being influenced and inspired by well-known Western European preachers, as well as his Transylvanian mentors.

A certain crisis has been around in the American Protestant preaching since the 1960’s. It was a crisis caused by boredom in the pews: people were listening to good sermons about the Christian faith, but they were not ignited by the flame of a real faith! The New Homiletic movement addressed this crisis offering narrative, inductive-style sermons, where the ancient Rhetorical notion of ‘delighting’ or delectare has become a key in turning the Christian faith into a personal conviction.

After World War II many questions were raised by the „generation of sons” to their fathers regarding the war. There was an urgent need to cope with the past somehow. In this past elaboration the voice of the victims was worth to listen to and forgiveness of the aggressors became a major question of the society. This article was born from a study of western forgiveness-discussions and presents the Hungarian forgiveness-ethos after the end of the Great War and the big changes of 1989.

This article intends to present and evaluate the homiletical heritage of the great Hungarian representative of Puritanism, Pál Medgyesi. He wrote the first Hungarian manual on homiletics, entitled: Doce nos orare quin et praedicare. It is argued here that his method of writing a sermon presented in this manual provides a considerable support to improve the preaching of the Hungarian Reformed Church in the 21th century. This improvement is not to be achieved merely copying of his methodology but by the reflectively rethinking his theological-homiletical approach.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the young László Ravasz began to rethink the main principles of Hungarian Reformed homiletics. His program was basically stimulated by the so- called “value-theology”, inspired by the Neo-Kantian philosophy. In this paper I examine his homilethical method by analysing his Christmas sermons. I scrutinize the rhetorical situation, the chosen biblical texts, the structure, the content, and the illustrations of the sermons. I conclude that half century later, we can still learn from Ravasz’ views.

Der Aufsatz behandelt die theologischen, hermeneutischen und wissenschaftsgeschicht­lichen Grundfragen der Bibelexegese. Warum bedarf die Bibel einer Interpretation, und warum soll sie wissenschaftlich sein? Nach diesen Fragen wird die historisch-kritische Exegese defi­niert, sie als die weithin geeignetste Methode für die Auslegung von biblischen Texten aufge­zeigt und die Rolle der strukturalistischen, leser-zentrierten und adjektivischen Methoden auf das Feld der Homiletik zugewiesen.

Diese Studie untersucht das 4. Kapitel der Offenbarung aus homiletischer Sicht. Der Text (als Predigttext), der direkt auf die Kapitel 1–3 reagiert, verkündet die Botschaft in der Form- sprache der apokalyptischen Gattung. Eine Predigt über diesen Text fordert einen spezifischen Zugang, der das kodierte Kerygma zu finden versucht, während sie auch die durch apokalyptische Mittel angegebene Form ernst nimmt. Die Studie konzentriert sich auf das Narrative, (auf Geschehnisse) der Off.